


Until Kingdom Come

by rumandstars



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Asylum
Genre: Character Study, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-15
Updated: 2014-04-15
Packaged: 2018-01-19 12:43:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1470280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rumandstars/pseuds/rumandstars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Are monsters born or are they made?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Until Kingdom Come

**Author's Note:**

> Unedited character study, emphasis on unedited.

Sometimes, late at night after the other boys have fallen asleep and the room is full of their childish snuffles and snores, the symptoms of nightmares and restless dreams of lives long past, parents long dead or lost, Oliver thinks he can remember her. He holds the thin blanket against his chest and imagines it’s his mother. Her perfume would smell like fresh strawberries and her hair would tickle his cheek as she held her only boy, her precious son, until he drifted off to sleep. And drift off to sleep he does, but when he wakes up he’s clutching nothing but a blanket.

Oliver knows he can expect to be at the orphanage longer than the other boys. He is quiet, skinny, and tall for his age. He is also extremely intelligent, something few are aware of because he rarely speaks. He’s saving all his words as if they are precious gems, only to be gifted to the special someone destined to be his mother. He watches from the window as his roommates leave one by one with smiling mothers and fathers who drive sleek cars and wear expensive clothes. _That will be me soon_ , he tells himself.

It isn’t, though, not for a long time, not until he’s close to twelve years old and he’s the oldest boy in the orphanage. He makes friends with the mice that scuttle through the walls and smuggles them pieces of cheese from his ham sandwich at lunch. Late at night he whispers stories to his squeaky friends. He won’t be alone forever, he tells them as they watch him intently with their beady black eyes. He’s going to live in a big house with his mother and father very soon. His mother will take him to the zoo and sneak him sweets before dinner. His father will be kind, and although he’ll be busy with work most of the time, he’ll always take time out on the weekends to play ball with his son.

“And then I’ll live happily ever after,” Oliver says.

The mice finish their meal of cheese and run back into the walls. Oliver wonders if they tell his story to their own families. He hopes so. It’s a good story, after all, and it’s going to have the best ending imaginable.

Then one day a strange woman with cloudy eyes and sharp cheekbones comes to the orphanage. Oliver is on his bed reading a book about knights. He wants to be a knight someday. He’ll travel the world and rescue princesses from their towers. He’ll be a hero, and that would make any mother proud.

The strange woman stops and looks him over. She holds out her hand. Oliver shakes it, bites down on his nervous smile. She’s very ugly, not at all who he expected, and she smells like she hasn’t bathed in days. She says her name is Annie Smith and she’s going to be taking him home.

“Foster care,” she explains. “Until you find a permanent residence. You’re too old for this place anyhow, ain’t you, kid?”

He doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t say anything. He says goodbye to the mice, packs his meager belongings in an old suitcase that doesn’t quite close all the way, and leaves with Annie in her beat up Ford.

Annie has a drug problem. She overdoses within three months, on the day of his thirteenth birthday. Oliver finds her face down on her bed, her mouth full of the vomit she choked to death on. He goes back to the orphanage for a few weeks before being sent out again, this time with a married couple. The husband’s name is Elliot, the wife’s name is Charlotte. Elliot works long hours and leaves Oliver in Charlotte’s care. She wears perfume that smells like strawberries and has silky hair. One night Oliver has a nightmare and crawls into bed with Elliot and Charlotte. The husband wakes up and slaps Oliver across the face for snuggling with his wife.

“He’s just a boy,” she sobs. “He doesn’t mean anything by it. He’s scared and alone.”

Oliver is sent back to the orphanage. He thinks of Charlotte often, how soft her skin had been when he’d pressed himself up against her. To his horror he starts getting hard.

It’s a fluke. He’s growing up. These things were bound to happen to him eventually. Oliver is only human, just a boy, like Charlotte said. Oliver just needs to remember that there is a difference between plain old women and mothers. Mothers are holy beings, women are just women. It’s okay to want one, but it’s not okay to want the other.

Telling himself that doesn’t help, not in the least. He is repulsed by most of his foster families. He finds himself irrationally hating the fathers and disgusted by the ugly, uncaring mothers. The few times he does get placed with a nice couple, they send him back shortly after taking him into their home. Oliver knows why. He can’t stop touching the women, placing his hands on their shoulders or cupping their elbows in his palm, burying his face in their chests when he’s upset, slipping into bed next to them when he has bad dreams. Sometimes he gets an erection, and he knows the women feel it, that they’re too worried about upsetting him to say anything.

He always gets sent back. He wishes he could stop.

At seventeen he starts setting traps for his old mice pals. He uses the cheese from his sandwiches for old time’s sake. They’re live traps, perfectly safe, crafted from cardboard. The mice never have time to chew themselves free because he’s always waiting for them. Oliver hides silverware in his pockets and uses it to dissect the mice. If he’s lucky, he gets to open them up all the way before their hearts stop beating. Rodent hearts are tiny, and they flutter pathetically like the wings of butterflies before stopping. Anatomy is easy to understand, unlike himself. He finds it comforting.

Eventually he gets out and earns his GED while working at a shoddy shoe store. His test scores are so high he earns a scholarship to med school. He goes, and discovers he is broken inside, carrying his dead mother around with him. Once he finds a replacement, he is sure he’ll be fixed. No one will ever have to know the horrible things he thinks about late at night, or the even more horrifying things he does to the corpses in the lab freezers at school. His mother’s touch will cure him.

Years later, after his hands are stained with the blood of innocent people, Lana Winters finally comes along, forced into an asylum for something as silly as wanting to sleep with other women. She is meant to be his, and he is meant to be hers. When she escapes him he experiences a moment of crippling doubt. He wants to kill her and then himself. But then he finds out she’s carrying his child, and all at once there can be no denying she truly is his mother. She carries a part of him inside her, his child. The child will be born and then she can be a mother to them both. He will finally have his family, the happy ending he always craved in his seemingly endless years at the orphanage.

But in the end she is like everyone else. She has failed to be a mother to his child, and by extension failed to be a mother to him. He has to kill her and keep searching. He’ll never stop searching.

Lana shoots Oliver Thredson in the back of the head. She can’t bring herself to kill his child. Lana refuses to think of it as _their_ child. She’s abandoned the boy before he’s even born, but he’s part of Oliver through and through.

Oliver Thredson’s son will never stop searching for his mother, either.


End file.
